A Smart Pillow for Health Sensing System Based on Temperature and Humidity Sensors

Abstract

The quality of sleep affects the patient’s health, along with the observation of vital life signs such as body temperature and sweat in sleep, is essential in the monitoring of sleep as well as clinical diagnosis. However, traditional methods in recording physiological change amidst sleep is difficult without being intrusive. The smart pillow is developed to provide a relatively easy way to observe one’s sleep condition, employing temperature and humidity sensors by implanting them inside the pillow in strategic positions. With the patient’s head on the pillow, the roles of sensors are identified as main, auxiliary or environmental temperature, based on the differences of value from three temperature sensors, thus the pattern of sleep can be extracted by statistical analysis, and the body temperature is inferred by a specially designed Fuzzy Logic System if the head-on position is stable for more than 15 min. Night sweat is reported on data from the humidity sensor. Therefore, a cloud-based health-sensing system is built in the smart pillow to collect and analyze data. Experiments from various individuals prove that statistical and inferred results reflect normal and abnormal conditions of sleep accurately. The daily sleeping information of patients from the pillow is helpful in the decision-making of diagnoses and treatment, and users can change their habits of sleep gradually by observing the data with their health professional.

Sleep Pattern Analysis in Unconstrained and Unconscious State

“…Studies related to sleep analysis can be divided into sleep movement analysis [ 8 , 9 , 10 ], sleep disorder (or sleep disturbance) analysis [ 8 , 11 , 12 ], and sleep stage analysis [ 4 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. Accordingly, the main analysis targets include breathing [ 11 , 16 ], body movement [ 8 , 9 ], heart rate [ 13 , 16 , 17 , 18 ], and respiration rate [ 16 ].…”

“…The primary equipment used for sleep monitoring is imaging technology , such as Kinect [ 3 ], an RGB camera [ 12 ], a thermal imaging camera [ 9 , 11 ], a pillow with built-in force sensitive resistor (FSR) sensors [ 19 , 20 ], and sensors attached to the arm or stomach (wrist sensor [ 10 , 15 , 21 ], flexible belt [ 17 ]). Several studies have also employed transmission methods (wireless fidelity [Wi-Fi] [ 19 ] and ultrawide band [UWB] [ 18 ]).…”

“…Chung et al [ 15 ] presented an approach to classify sleep stages via a low cost and noncontact multimodal sensor fusion, which extracted sleep-related vital signals from radar signals and a sound-based context-awareness technique. Furthermore, they incorporated medical/statistical knowledge to determine personal-adjusted thresholds and device postprocessing and compared sleep stage classification performance between a single sensor and sensor fusion algorithms.…”

Introducing the Q-strip to Quantitatively Measure Nocturnal Perspiration as a Parameter and Predictor: A Review of Literature

“…Literature on direct perspiration measures is scarce. Although there is a call for the development of special techniques, such as the Q-strip, to introduce a more useful health sensing system (S. Li & C. Chiu, 2018). The quality of sleep affects the patient's health.…”

Reduction of the Measurement Time of a Chemiresistive Gas Sensor Using Transient Analysis and the Cantor Pairing Function

“…Chemical gas sensors that transform chemical information to electrical signals have a strong demand in many applications, including environmental monitoring, healthcare, personal safety, and food quality analysis. − Numerous efforts have been made in the recent past to improve the sensitivity, selectivity, and limit of detection and reduce the energy consumption of the gas sensors by developing various material synthesis, device fabrication, and analytical strategies. − However, many applications also demand low measurement times to obtain sensing results. For example, it is crucial to instantly detect toxic or flammable gas leakage to avoid or minimize the loss of lives.…”